For parents who need to do their shopping with kids, it’s often incredibly challenging to find what they want while also keeping their little ones in check. Kids don’t always understand how valuable everything is and quickly get bored.
This can lead to some very destructive behavior, as a shocking story from a Sephora store showed a couple of years ago.
It all started when Brittney Nelson, who is a makeup artist by trade, went into one of the famous makeup chain’s stores in Augusta, Georgia. While Sephora is well known and loved by customers for its generous sampling policies, allowing customers to try pretty much anything in the store, what she saw that day was an “atrocity,” as she described it on
Facebook.
As she and her friend entered the store, they saw “a mom/kid [who] were hustling out of there.” Once in the store, Nelson realized why they were making such a sudden departure. Though she didn’t catch the tyke in the act, she told
Insider, “the glittery footprints helped us decipher it was a tiny human.”
“$1,300 of Make Up Forever eye shadow destroyed at Sephora tonight due to a small child,” summed up the scene. In shock and dismay at the sight, Nelson tried to imagine how it could have happened. “I’m sure that [the child] thought they were finger paints and had no idea how naughty they were being.”
Whatever the reason for the destruction, Nelson felt the main message was for the parents: “mommas please shop for your makeup without your tiny humans. It’s not fun for you... or them... or the expensive product.”
While Nelson didn’t say kids should be banned from the stores or shopping trips entirely, she did suggest that the mother in question should have been a lot more attentive to what her child was getting up to. As she wrote in her post, “being me [a makeup artist], I’ve needed to bring [my daughter] into many makeup stores as she’s grown and had a strict ‘hands in pockets’ rule for her and a strict 10-minute rule for me.”
Nelson suggested that other moms try the same with their kids if ever they had to bring them into stores. Most of all, she felt for the employees, who had a destroyed display and huge damage on their hands. “In no time flat they calmed down their panic-mode faces, brought out a cart, whisked away that display, cleaned up the remainder and the floor,” Nelson told Insider.
Nelson had no idea her post would get so much attention, but soon it went massively viral as retail workers, such as salon specialists, and lots of moms began weighing in. There was definitely a big contingent who echoed her views about parents’ responsibilities.
As Twitter user
Belinda Laurie commented, she always made sure to keep track of her three kids whenever in stores, doing a quick check every couple of minutes at most. “That woman whose child ruined the Sephora display is careless & self-absorbed.” From Laurie and many others’ perspective, “it’s [a parent’s] job to make sure my kids aren’t destroying store property.”
Others, however, thought Nelson’s post and the comments following it were “mommy-shaming,” part of a broader world makes moms feel as though nothing they do is right or good enough.
Leah Marie Griffin tweeted: “This is not okay, as if it isn’t hard enough for a mom to be out in public with her young kids 1) the employees didn’t SEE who did this 2) that’s a good 4 [feet] up unless this 2 [year old] is the size of a 10 [year old] I doubt it was a ‘young child’. #stopmomshaming”.
Being a mom herself, Nelson told Insider she had no intention of shaming other moms, simply warning them about the dangers of shopping for such pricey products with kids.
Perhaps the best response of all came from Nelson herself: “If I do see a kid doing that in a store I will just offer to help the mom out.”
